Book Review: Castoffs of Capital

Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love Among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, by Lamia Karim (2022). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lamia Karim’s Castoffs of Capital identifies misconceptions and stereotypes about garment workers in Bangladesh and highlights the limitations of the extant academic literature in capturing the full life cycles of women workers. In response, Karim’s text explores the experiences of Bangladesh’s garment workers beyond the factory, examining how factory work both generates and constrains new desires and forms of subjectivity.

The text’s introduction provides background on the feminization of labor in Bangladesh’s garment industry and examines feminist theories of life under neoliberalism. Here, Karim acknowledges the “work and nonwork lives” of these female garment workers (3). The author outlines her methods and process of conducting interviews and surveys in collaboration with a labor rights NGO. As such, Karim’s engagement with these methods and institutions, as well as reflections on her positionality, form a central tenet of the feminist anthropology on display in this text.

Chapter 1, “The Disorder of Work and Life,” is a theoretical and literature-based overview of the book. The author notes that much of the social scientific literature on female garment workers overlooks their non-work and post-work lives. She draws on theorizations of affect and aspirations under neoliberalism and modern capitalism—primarily through Laura Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Carla Freeman’s Entrepreneurial Selves (2014)—to frame her ethnographic material and address these omissions. Karim employs the theories of capitalism from these texts to identify the capitalist modernity and modern subjecthood currently existing in Bangladesh. By analyzing how affect and aspirations are shaped by broader capitalist structures, Karim’s work is situated within the structure-versus-agency debate, a signature contribution of feminist anthropology to the humanities and social sciences.

Chapter 2, “The Age of Excitement: The Rise of the Garment Industry in Bangladesh,” documents the development of the country’s garment sector from the 1970s onwards. Karim discusses how the contemporary development paradigm of “women’s empowerment” is “a discursive rhetorical device that domesticates women into the neoliberal economy as low-paid workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, both of which are precarious occupations” (58)—which is at the foundation of Bangladesh’s economic modernity. By discussing the agrarian policies that rendered peasant livelihoods increasingly untenable beginning in the late 1980s (60), this chapter outlines the role of the global garment industry in reshaping Bangladesh during its transition from a largely agricultural economy to one based on export manufacturing. Karim concludes the chapter with a discussion of legal changes in the garment industry and the labor activism that followed the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which killed over 1,000 workers (mostly women).

Chapter 3, “The Arc of Change: Factory, Family, and Class,” is based on surveys of 100 women garment workers in Bangladesh. Karim finds that these women usually come from landless or impoverished agricultural families and have migrated to Dhaka to work in the garment industry. Karim includes images and descriptions of emerging forms of urban living—within informal settlements or “slums”—and the social relationships that these newly urbanized, wage-earning women develop. Within this precarious setting, she highlights a trend of spousal abandonment, domestic violence, and “gender-based envy” among her interlocutors (80). Karim also emphasizes the new forms of class subjectivity that women garment workers experience—as urban wage-earning subjects who have more access to capital than their husbands or rural family members.

Chapter 4, “Changing Norms of Romance, Marriage, and Sexuality,” offers further contextual and ethnographic detail on the types of relationships that women garment workers are forming. In this chapter, there are three major tensions that are also present in the poem “Krishno, The Lover,” written by former garment worker and trade unionist Lovely Yasmin (128). Identified by Karim as a “postmodern collage” (128) of romantic imagery, the poem employs Bhakti Hindu imagery of the divine Krishno as the archetypal lover, a trope used in other songs and myths within Bengal’s Muslim imaginaire (see Tony Stewart’s Witness to Marvels). The first of these tensions is between what is part of tradition (old) and what is modern (new). For example, one might ask what historical precedents exist for the modern manipulation of flexible Islamic marriage and divorce laws. There is a second tension in the text between romantic love and sexual desire. Sexual relations are narrativized by Karim’s interlocutors and interpreted by her to be part of the pursuit of love. Regarding a woman’s relationship with a younger man, Karim states that “perhaps love too would become possible through their sexual intimacy” (161). As in the genre of Krishno poetry that Yasmin’s poem references, sexual desire and spiritual and romantic love are not always separable. The third tension questions what lies inside and outside of the market. Although Karim argues that “the interiority of these women’s feelings is irreducible to commodification” (124), it is difficult to find evidence of anything exterior to modern capitalism. These tensions are not necessarily shortcomings of the chapter but are rather generative openings.

Chapter 5, “After Work: Life in the Shadows of Capital,” observes the lives of women who belong to an older generation of garment workers, many of whom have “aged out” of the industry. This chapter seemed most successful at achieving the author’s aim of sharing the “work and non-work lives” of women garment workers (3). As such, Karim recounts the lives of four workers who received some economic security in the form of relatively consistent wages during their years of industrial employment. The limited timeframe in which they can earn wages and the structural crises that they experience create precarious forms of subjectivity and aspirations that can seem impossible to achieve in the long term. Each of these women struggle, aspire, and narrate their lives differently. Karim sums up this chapter by stating “beyond work, most of these women’s search for the erotic life of an enduring and loving embrace remained a mirage. There existed a missing object in their lives called love” (197). From a scholarly perspective, it seems uncertain whether Karim is taking interpretive liberties in identifying her interlocutors’ longing for love as the thread that unites their narratives. While love is absent from their life stories, the accounts presented in the text appear defined less by the pursuit of love than by the pursuit of stability or propriety. In this regard, Karim neither clarifies what is meant by love nor fully investigates the narrative strategies through which her interlocutors deploy love.

Castoffs of Capital is an accessible read and is one ideally suited for an interdisciplinary readership in the social sciences. With its reliance on and description of methods such as interviews and surveys, the text can help train researchers to incorporate humanistic perspectives that are often overlooked when examining organizational, institutional, or larger-scale industrial processes. Moreover, the book is situated within a body of scholarship that takes an applied feminist approach to the anthropology of work. Karim focuses primarily on the “nonwork lives” (3) of her interlocutors but contextualizes these within their experiences of work, life histories, and ability to organize within trade unions. In this regard, she often contextualizes these narratives of everyday life within larger discussions on labor organizing. Given that Karim highlights the connections between affect, aspirations, and labor politics, this text can serve as a bridge between humanistic and social scientific accounts of feminist labor activism and organizing, particularly in the context of developing economies.